www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1218878,00.html
UP 415pm 'Sarin bomb attack' on US troops Agencies Monday May 17, 2004 A roadside bomb containing a small amount of the nerve agent sarin has exploded near a US military convoy in Iraq, the US military announced today. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, said the US weapons inspection team, the Iraq Survey Group, had confirmed that a 155mm artillery round containing sarin had been found in Baghdad. The find is the first confirmed discovery of any of the weapons that the US-led coalition had accused Saddam Hussein of harbouring before they attacked Iraq last year.
A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent," he said. IEDs are a favoured tool of Iraq insurgents trying to target US convoys as they drive by. "The cell is designed to work after being fired from an artillery piece." He said the dispersal of the nerve agent from a device such as the homemade bomb is "limited", and there were no casualties as a result of the blast, which occurred "a couple of days ago". "The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war," Brig Gen Kimmitt said. "Two explosive ordinance team members were treated for minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the partial detonation of the round." In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentence him to be executed. Sarin was developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists. A single drop of can cause a quick, agonising choking death. There are no known instances of the Nazis actually using the gas, but it was added to several countries' chemical weapons arsenals, including Saddam-era Iraq. Iraq acknowledged making thousands of rockets, artillery shells and bombs containing sarin and used the chemical during its war with Iran in the 1980s and is believed to have used it against Kurdish Iraqi civilians. Nerve gases work by inhibiting key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly. Antidotes to nerve gases similar to sarin are so effective that top poison gas researchers predict they eventually will cease to be a war threat.
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